Creators

Creators

by Deborah L. Davitt

The potter worked the clay,
forming hands that clasped his own,
wet-slick clay turning his skin brown.

He breathed life into them, whispering
words that would give them souls; they awoke
and gripped him gently in return.

And as he formed them, he found himself
being formed in turn; they laved him
with their essence, made him one of them.

Till in the end, there was nothing that
divided creator from created; they each
made the other, and made each other whole.

* * *

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Reno, Nevada, but received her MA in English from Penn State. She currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her poetry has received Rhysling and Pushcart nominations and appeared in over twenty journals; her short fiction has appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Compelling Science Fiction, Grievous Angel, and The Fantasist. For more about her work, please see www.edda-earth.com.

Where do you get the ideas for your poems?

I honestly get the ideas for poems from many different sources. Sometimes, I give myself an assignment—read five science articles, distill one of them into a poem. Read about a piece of mythology that I’ve never read about before, and respond to it in verse. Sometimes I see an image, as I did with “Creators” and I feel the need to respond to that image in words. Other times? I usually wake up in the morning with a song beating in my head, but other times, it’s a word I haven’t used in a while, like ‘deliquescent.’ And then I find I need to do something with that word to get rid of it. Like passing on an earworm—now that word belongs to someone else, and it’s out of my head. And sometimes, verse is just an emotional shout, a way to get rid of an emotional reaction in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone else.